Agnes:

Hi Robin!

Robin:

Hi Agnes!

Agnes:

Hi Jimmy! Today we have Jimmy Lakhan with us, helping us talk to each other. So, we picked this topic of asceticism because I think we determined Robin that you’re an ascetic of some kind. So maybe it’s quite nat…

Robin:

I came to this and you leaped upon the chance to debate of issue of values, which I feel vulnerable on, because I really don’t feel like I know how to…

Agnes:

You don’t have any values?

Robin:

I don’t know how to defend values. I don’t know how to argue for them. And you’re very practiced at that. And so, here I am having to somehow defend this value that I do seem to have.

Agnes:

Well, first say what it is.

Robin:

So, I take asceticism as a sort of self-denial relative to some priority. That is you have some – so a monk is famously ascetic, because they’ve devoted their life to this religious order and they are denying some potential pleasures or other things they could enjoy in their life in order to make themselves focused more on this religious cause. And others of us, who have other kinds of causes, might similarly devote ourselves to those. I understand let’s say, Roman elites had a certain celebration of say, men not being too into sex because that would say take you away from your military cause and your devotion to the empire and your roles. And there’s often been a celebration and somewhat glory for people who have a cause they value so much that they’re willing to devote themselves to it and to resist other temptations which might get in the way of their devotion to that cause.

Agnes:

So I feel like it’s a really interesting topic to talk about with an economist, because I would have thought that the economist would have been just tempted to frame it as just a garden variety tradeoff. It’s like, “Well look, you value this thing more than the other thing so you’re going to take more of the thing you value more of and less of the other thing, right? Why do we need this denial and asceticism? Like why not just think of it as a tradeoff?

Robin:

So it’s like the, you know, the man who uncovered his ears as they pass the sirens and how to…

Agnes:

Odysseus.

Robin:

Odysseus, tied to the mast, right, that he wanted to hear, but he didn’t want to be too tempted and he needed to resist that temptation. So we could put this in the context of self-control. That is, my understanding is that foragers are less into self-control. They just more do what feels right. And with the farming world, humans put more celebration on self-control, because we adopted new kinds of norms, which felt less natural to people. And then we celebrated people who could be more self-controlled and achieve the norms that those societies celebrated, and then resist the temptations that foragers would have given into, such as promiscuity, or leisure, the sort of fun, that feels natural, but, you know, people came to more celebrate, resisting the fun, that it was natural and being more devoted to a cause.

Agnes:

OK, so you – there’s stuff that you like, that feels natural to you, but you deny it to yourself, because of a cause. If you identify as an ascetic, that’s just what it is for you to meet that definition? Is that right? And I want to know what is the cause and then what is this stuff that you’re denying yourself that you would otherwise be pursuing?

Robin:

So there are several different levels at which you could deny yourself something. So for example, in high school, I noticed all sorts of other people’s families liked to go sailing or like to go skiing. And it seemed to me that those were pretty expensive, time-consuming activities. And I thought it might be better off if I didn’t learn to like those things. So you could imagine someone who really likes skiing denying themselves a ski trip that they want to do. But you can also imagine someone just choosing not even tried to get into skiing, because they fear they might like it too much. So for example, I have at times play video games, and I haven’t played a video game in a long time, and I know I could really get into them. But if I just don’t start them, I won’t get into them, and then I won’t play them as much.

Agnes:

So you’re not really an ascetic, you’re like a proto-ascetic. In order to not have to deny yourself things you prevent yourself from even stepping into the train?

Robin:

Honestly, I think a lot of self-control is sort of arranging your circumstances to make it easier to do the thing you intended to do earlier. I think we give a lot of people credit for self-control, which they don’t really deserve because they’re not at the moment controlling. They are priorly arranging their worlds so as to take away temptations and to put them on a habit that will do the right thing. I’m open to whether the word asceticism is the right word here. But I am willing to say that I have causes that I feel devoted enough to that I enjoy pursuing and I enjoy the glory of them, and I enjoy somewhat the glory of my devotion to them. If that actually is cashed out in terms of more achievements, more progress on them, I would feel very proud of. So for example, some people stay at the office 80 hours a week, but they don’t get anything more done than if they were there 60 hours a week, but they want to credit for just having been really devoted to the job. So I’m not going to praise that. If the extra 20 hours actually produces more, well, then I can credit you for more devotion to the job. So, it will matter whether this self-denial is actually effective.

Agnes:

It seems close. And it really does seem close just a tradeoff, it’s just that you think you could develop a taste for it, and the tradeoff would become more expensive. Like if you started to enjoy video games, then you would have to be denying yourself something that you liked more, now you can deny yourself something that you liked – like less by not letting yourself get into video games.

Robin:

Well, the opportunity cost is the same. It’s just more the immediate temptation that differs, right? I mean, if I really would enjoy the video game, I am still foregoing that joy but it’s less vivid to me at the moment, because I haven’t recently done that, had that joy and so I’m not – it’s less of an immediate temptation, but the cost in some senses there. Don’t you have causes that you admire people’s devotion to?

Agnes:

Yeah, the value of the cause is the function of though, not like the things they are denying themselves in order to pursue the cause.

Robin:

But what if by denying things they can pursue the cause more? Isn’t that admirable if you admire the cause?

Agnes:

I mean, I don’t – I guess, I don’t know. Jimmy, do you think it’s more admirable to pursue causes by denying yourself stuff than just to pursue the cause, straightforwardly if you don’t have to deny yourself stuff?

Jimmy:

I suppose it depends on what you mean by denying. So Robin was sort of dancing around denying yourself. So he said that something had a cost to it. The example he gives video games, right? There’s a cost to it and he’s not playing video games right now, he’s not getting the enjoyment of it. But it’s not forefront in his mind I guess, the vividness, the enjoyment, the fun. So I suppose there’s like an objective cost there but on the subject of cost, maybe what you were thinking about those, which I find strange, because I thought economists tend to put things in terms of like the value, we cash the value of things out in terms of like, subjective preferences.

Robin:

Right.

Jimmy:

So, if it doesn’t seem like – maybe I’m missing something. But if it’s not forefront in your mind, it’s a cost that you potentially could incur. But you’re not at the moment like it doesn’t feel, there’s no – it doesn’t have a pull on you. Then is that – or is that really a cost then in the economic way of thinking?

Robin:

So there’s a certain sort of religious asceticism that might celebrate the momentary emotional cost. That, you know, you say, “You must really love God if you’re willing to lash yourself one more time on the back with a lash, right? And a little more bleeding and you must really love God if you’re willing to put up with that, right?” So I am not celebrating that, sort of.

Agnes:

It sort of sounded like you were.

Robin:

I’m more celebrating the thoughtful choice to avoid temptations that might distract you from what you really want to do.

Agnes:

But it’d be you celebrating that in relation to the person who doesn’t have to do it, so the person has to do a little bit of lashing. But yeah, Jimmy, I interrupted you.

Jimmy:

Well, so let me put it this way, suppose 2020 Earth Robin not only would enjoy video games were he to play them, but he’s played them recently and he remembers playing them.

Robin:

Right.

Jimmy:

Isn’t that costlier for him to forego video games than it would be for you? Like aren’t there a higher opportunity cost for twin Robin than for…

Robin:

Well, if we’re focused on the momentary cost and benefits as opposed to the extended cost and benefits over the future. And so yes, like again, you might celebrate their fortitude or their strength of character of being able to resist that immediate temptation but I’m less interested in celebrating fortitude and strength of character, at the moment I’m more interested in the overall consequences of achieving your cause more in the long run.

Agnes:

But if we can, if we imagine a third Robin, OK, who has no interest in video games at all, right, and he is able to – I have three kids, OK? I actually – to correspond to these three possible worlds. I have a kid who is very into video games, and he’s very inclined to just indulge this desire to the extent that we’ll let him, my youngest. And I have my middle son, who is into video games, but he himself is aware that it’s an issue and he restricts himself. He restricts his own playing. And then my oldest, has just zero interest. They don’t seem fun to him. He’s never been interested in them in any way. OK, so you are more like my middle child, right? But would you would you admire yourself more or less if you were like my oldest one, and you just didn’t even have the temptation to have the temptation?

Robin:

I guess there are different kinds of admiring there. I would say that we all face different temptations because we’re different. But we are all tempted by something. And that’s going to be a more robust feature of the human condition. We’re all just going to have stuff we like.

Agnes:

So everyone’s an ascetic who achieves anything, because they have to…

Robin:

To some degree, yes.

Agnes:

I mean, would you distinguish – so there might be like, expensive – it seems like you're classifying all this sort of expensive hobbies together. Like, so there’s the time-wise, expensive hobby of video game playing. There, you know, the reason we got to this topic, I think, was we were talking about like appreciating art, right? That might be an expensive hobby.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Or literature, right, or maybe you want to appreciate another culture, you have to learn a language. Those are also expensive forays into culture, like are you just going to classify all of those together as wastes of the time you could be spending, you still actually haven’t told us what the thing is.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

In whose service you’re doing this.

Robin:

So let’s do that. So, we were in the context, I think of talking about people who have a very diverse portfolio of culture that they appreciate. So a typical dinner party guests, wherein the conversation goes across literature and couches and vacation spots and politics and recent TV shows. And the job in the typical dinner party conversation to impress everybody is to show that you have substantial awareness in all these topics. And that’s a kind of cultured persona that many people celebrate and want to be. And I lament that because I say there’s this enormous gain we get by specializing, and especially in the world of ideas, among intellectuals, we gain enormous power by specializing. And so the intellectual who just sort of wants to show that they know a bit about everything. The opportunity costs there is if they would focus and specialize, then we could all just know more about everything by specializing working together. So I celebrate the intellectual who will specialize enough to gain the advantages of specialization and to then resist wanting to learn about everything except to the extent that like searching for other topics could give you ideas for things you can combine with the things you know. That’s a more concrete version of the thing I celebrate. I celebrate the intellectuals who will specialize enough to learn about a thing so that when they learn about it, they can share it with the rest of us and the entire world across history can grow together and learning on.

Agnes:

But so that thing where you share it with the rest of us, what you’re really doing is sharing it with a whole bunch of people who have zero interest or knowledge in it, right? And so, there’s a question what you mean by share.

Robin:

Zero, come on, that whole spe…

Agnes:

Well, not much. I mean, they haven’t wasted their time specializing in it, right? And so they’re not going to be very – like, you know, a good example is like aliens, right? You’ve done this work on aliens.

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

You’re trying to get on people talk about aliens, get interested in aliens. People are like, “I don’t care.” Right? And you’ve specialized in it, right? But that sort of the problem is like not a lot of people have specialized in that. And it’s also not one of these dinner party conversation topics. So you don’t really have a way in.

Robin:

Well, so you’re hypothesizing this extreme version of what if everyone were completely successful at this specializing tactic, but nobody is and that’s just not a realistic prospect.

Agnes:

So the world you wanted is that we’re unsuccessful? Isn’t that kind of the world we’re in?

Robin:

So I mean, most say non-professional intellectuals are dilettante in the sense that they like to spread out across a wide range of topics. And one of the biggest filters by people failing to succeed in academia is they won’t specialize enough on particular topics so that they can gain credibility and prestige within academia to become an academic. So the typical stance is very broad. And then academics focus enough to become academics, but even they have also broad interests. And I was unusually broad and somewhat lucky to succeed in academic even though I had unusually broad research areas. So I think it’s just, there’s just each person is going to actually have a wide range of awareness and interests. And so you’re resisting that to specialize, but you’re not going to completely succeed. You’re still going to have wide interests and knowledge of other things. So I don’t think there’s much of a risk that when you learn about this one specialized thing that nobody else will care because everybody is so specialized that nobody else has any knowledge or interest in it. That just seems not a problem.

Jimmy:

Can I interject?

Robin:

Please.

Jimmy:

It seems like we spent a lot of time talking about foregoing or resisting temptations as an aspect of asceticism. But I wonder if there’s another component to this, which is why you’re resisting the temptation, right? It doesn’t make me an ascetic. I take it to resist the temptation to eat that last piece of cheesecake in the fridge. It does maybe make me an ascetic, if I resist eating that last piece of cheesecake, it’s for like the glory of God.

Robin:

Right.

Jimmy:

So isn’t that a part of being an ascetic not just resisting temptations but why?

Robin:

Sure. So if you’re a religious ascetic, then you might say resist some pleasures, which you thought is say, too sexual or too hedonistic. And because you thought those were polluting your appreciation of God or religion. Whereas if you were an intellectual ascetic, like me, as long as those things didn’t take very long and much energy and distract you from the time it took to be intellectual, it wouldn’t be that much of a problem. So what kinds of things would distract you from what main purposes varies with the purpose? If you wanted to run for office, say as your higher goal in life, you would make sure at an early age to never do anything at least in public that somebody could quote you, or remember that would like, trash your career, right?

Agnes:

But you never call that asceticism?

Robin:

You wouldn’t? I would. I do know people who have ambitions to be politicians, and they, as a young people, sacrifice various inclinations in order to make sure there are no stories of themselves that would tarnish their potential future political career. And that’s a real sacrifice.

Jimmy:

I guess I’m puzzled. If you’re an intellectual ascetic, you’re foregoing pleasures, just say work on your book. I’m not sure how that differs much from you know, Sally going to Weight Watchers. I don’t want to – I mean she’s trying to lose weight. It’s a noble goal.

Robin:

Right.

Jimmy:

I don’t think that’s asceticism.

Robin:

No.

Jimmy:

I mean, it seems like it’s maybe noble, healthy, it’s maybe a good thing.

Robin:

Right. So maybe we use the word asceticism when we see the goal as a high goal of some sort. And if the goal is low enough, maybe we’re not willing to grant it that grand title. But it’s the similar process.

Agnes:

I think that there is – there’s something more about there is like at least usually almost a kind of moral judgment about the pleasures that you’re foregoing. So that it isn’t merely that they take up too much time that you could be spending on something else. It’s not just a kind of, you know, economizing of your attention resources or something. But it’s something like this, that there are pleasures which were you to indulge in them they would decrease your ability to even want to pursue these other things.

Robin:

So yeah, so for an intellectual ascetic, I would say one of the things you most want to resist temptation is, is sort of biases and allegiances that would let you make it difficult to sort of stand back and take a neutral objective, insightful view. For example, patriotism, or loyalty to your local group, or culture, or things like that. They would be more at odds with standing back. So for example, part of my intellectual goal is to sort of see all of history from a distance, all creatures, all cultures, the nature of minds in general. And for that I resist getting too attached to any particular culture or a point of view celebrating how great they are because that will make it harder for me to stand back and see all the possibilities. So that’s more of – as you say, some kinds of things that would get in your way or don’t get in your way more as fundamentally as others, like some things would just take away your time, some things will just take away your energy, other things would more directly block the kind of progress you’re trying to achieve.

Agnes:

OK. I mean, that’s also a very nonstandard example of asceticism. The idea – I mean you’re right, there are pleasures of belonging to a group or like, you know, patriotism or whatever. I mean, in my experience, there are groups you kind of like. So you like the group, intellectuals. You dislike the group elites. You prefer the group experts over the group elites. You often have – you like nerds, you like sort of the downtrodden, the oppressed, the bullied, which these are common affiliations that people have, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So, it’s not just like, well, there are limits to your capacity to be ascetic and so you have indulged in the pleasures of tribalism in those cases, because you can’t make yourself completely neutral.

Robin:

Well, I mean, when you say I’m going to try to not allow myself to be biased by allegiance to particular groups, it doesn’t mean I’m going to never make judgments. That would also be, get in the way of being intellectual. There are many intellectual tasks and products where I will need to make judgments and so that’s, of course, all the more problematic. I’m tempted to be biased, but I need to make a judgment so I’ll need to be all the more careful on those but I still will need to make judgments about those things sometimes.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, I guess I think it seems to me the question of potential sources of bias is really not what asceticism is about that. What asceticism is about is that there are some things that we want, or that we want to pursue, and religion is a good example. But I do think the intellectual life is another good example. Where, in a sense, like, though we admire them, or we have them as an ideal, we’re also tempted to depart from that ideal, and we’re tempted to do other things and like our motivation and respect to the ideal is never as strong as we want it to be. That’s the important thing, right? So we think we ought to be more motivated in respect of that ideal than we in fact are. And this is exactly why I think it's a weird topic for economists, because I thought that’s a weird thing for economists to try to say about motivation.

Robin:

Right. You saw blood in the water.

Agnes:

And so, I am in a way, the person who is ascetic is precisely the one who is admitting that their motivation with respect to the higher goal is on sort of shaky ground, right? So that’s why it’s not exactly noble. And that they could be pulled away from it by indulging in certain other pleasures where those pleasures would be more immediately visible or attractive to them. Right? So like, is that what you’re admitting by yourself in terms of your pursuit of the intellectual life?

Robin:

It would have to be, yes. So the whole point would be to say, yes, I– like someone has written a book on aspiration would say, I have this ideal, and I want to achieve that ideal of being devoted to this cause. But realistically, I’m not as fully devoted to that cause as like might otherwise want to be and so I have temptations that would take me away from it and I’m trying to limit the effect of those temptations. But it seems to me that being biased about various important intellectual conclusions is exactly central to the devotion to being an intellectual. That’s not a peripheral or side thing that’s as close to sort of religious person not wanting to sin by taking part in sinful pleasures, that as you could get, I think,

Agnes:

No, I don’t think that’s right, because like, you know, one way that you glossed this was like, you don’t think we should do the dinner party thing, you think people should specialize in each of those topics. Now, presumably, you don’t think that each of these topics is a sin or something, I mean, they each potential intellectual topics, right, but you…

Robin:

Oh, and I meant with the bias with respect to like, feeling an allegiance to the United States, right? If your view of world history puts US front and center, because you live in the United States, then you are at risk of distorting your view of world history say, because of your allegiance to US. Or, for example, being an economist, you might emphasize economics more in the history of academia. That is, those are the kinds of…

Agnes:

OK, but I guess I feel that that’s a different point. I mean, you know, you have biases in virtue of how you’re situated in the world. And then you can try to correct for those, I suppose and you can maybe make yourself less situated. That’s your approach.

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

And…

Robin:

And I say that is one of the risks about being very cultural. That is very cultural people often culture embodies a lot of sort of local values and local ideology and sense of what’s the good and what’s the bad. And the more you immerse yourself in your local culture, the more those local cultural values are impressed upon you and the harder it is to step back and see things from the point of view of all people, all cultures.

Agnes:

OK, that’s more – now, I’m getting it better. So it’s like you – the dinner party thing was really a red herring. So it’s really about, like, you know, the… you want to be detached in a certain way from the world that you’re in, right?

Robin:

To some degree.

Agnes:

To some degree. And so, you don’t want to – so like you –so would it be safer for you if you got into like some cultural stuff that was like from another culture that you would view that as more OK? Like if you played video games from like another country or something,

Robin:

If I happen to come from a Basque region of Spain say.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

I mean my culture was just a very weird, very unusual culture.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Then I could feel very loyal to the culture because the issue of pro versus anti Basque would hardly ever come up in my studies and everything else. And it wouldn’t actually be very likely to bias me on most things. So, that would be OK but because I’m part of some large cultures, then my opinions on those are much more likely to distort my opinions on sort of major overall perspectives.

Agnes:

So your thought is that these people who are cultured, like, who have dinner party ideas about all different topics are more biased towards their local environment, even though a lot of that culture stuff is like from the past.

Robin:

Yes, I mean, but that is their local environment.

Agnes:

OK, but I mean, I guess I think that I sort of tend to think it’s the opposite, that we are all pretty absorbed in our local environments, we’re consuming via the internet, like the way politics is being done now, the way movies and TV are being done now. And then people who are consuming art that was from a variety of different cultures and a variety of different times are in some sense detaching from that and you’re fully immersed in it, if you’re…

Robin:

So there is this conceit, I would call it. That sort of elite culture which celebrates travel and art is therefore less biased and more universal than other cultures commonly in the world. I don’t buy that.

Agnes:

But you think you’re in one of just detachment is less biased and more universal? So how do we study which of those two is true? That is, you and the elite culture person both make this claim to universality, how can we tell who's right?

Robin:

I don’t have any easy way off the top of my head. But it seems like just focusing on universals, actual universals, is a better way to do that than on purported universals. That is, the elite people who travel and celebrate travel, they don’t travel to every random place and culture in the world. They have a particular set of high class places to travel to, and they do the same sort of things there. And so it’s not a representative sampling. So, most directly a representative sampling is a better way to sort of avoid bias, that is learned about all sorts of different people in times and places, all sorts of classes, professions, walks of life, ages, that would be a better way to actually be brought.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess it seems like one thing we do with our lives is try to appreciate good things. Right? And, fundamentally, that’s what the appreciation of culture is, right? They’re just beautiful and interesting things that have been created that we can consume. And so your thought is, yes, but you’re going to forego that you’re going to sacrifice that value for the sake of this universal being able to be detached. And maybe the question for me then is like your whole project was getting back to value, right? But it’s about pursuing value in a certain way, like, the values that you’re really attuned to are like having lots of people in the future,

Robin:

Who know a lot because we all work together to learn a lot by specializing.

Agnes:

I mean – but the reason they should know a lot is to have even more people even further into the future that is…

Robin:

That’s also useful, but…

Agnes:

You think the knowledge is supposed to like that’s our last conversation, you said that the knowledge, like knowledge needs to explain why it’s important. And the way you explained – the example you gave me is quantum computing is important because we can make quantum computers and then they can compute things really fast. And so all this knowledge, the point of that is to make more people taking up more space, right? And so, but then there’s just this question of like, what’s the good if any of it, right? And…

Robin:

Well, I mean, when A leads to B leads to B leads to A on and indefinitely, do we really need to choose which of them A versus B we’re going for? Going for either one leads to the other one, and we like them both then let’s just to do them.

Jimmy:

I think Agnes is asking a question of (?) as to, it seems like in your view you have a lot of instrumental value, right, things that are valuable for the sake of something else. Does that also – does your view also include intrinsic value, something that we value for its own sake?

Robin:

So that seems a hard choice to make. And so as usual, I asked do I need to make it? That is, we can point to many things we value and it’s hard to tell which of them are instrumental and which one of them are final. And if they are pretty highly correlated, that is they tend to come together, then it’s hard to actually know which ones we fundamentally value, you know, if we can’t pull them apart. So more people in the future leads to more knowledge in the future leads to more different cultural richness and value in the future leads to more technological expansion and abilities in the future. And they all go together. So I want all of it, do I need to choose, which is which why we’re – are there choices I’m making that forces me to choose?

Agnes:

Well, I mean, you could, you know, there’s a question of whether there’s any point to any of it. Right?

Robin:

If you like any of these things, they all go together then that’s enough. You have to – you don’t feel like a whole (?).

Agnes:

But you – so you had a, you know, you’re putting in the form of a conditional, right? And I’m saying, “Yeah, why should I like any of it?” That is, I had some reasons for liking things before and during this conversation, right? But those reasons are things where like you’re willing to deprive yourself kind of, of all of that, because of your asceticism, right? Of all of… of many of the things that I would have seen to be the intrinsic value kind that underwrite the value of life and so you’ve taken a bunch of stuff away, right? And so now I want to know, what are you giving me instead? And your answer tends to be like the future. But I’m just worried that that is just a kind of, you know, pyramid scheme or something. Where, like, the point of this generation is the next generation.

Robin:

So let me give you the full-throated version, see if that works for you. There is this vast future, beautiful and magnificent that I can envision. In that vast future, there’s vast numbers of people living vast lives with vastly larger minds than ours and seeing and feeling far more and understanding far more than we do now. And I, today, want to be part of that. And my way to be part of that is to contribute to it, to help make it. And I want to look among all the different things I could do, what could I best do to help make that happen and make it better. And my choices, I can be intellectual, and I can specialize in intellectual, and I could gain insight that other people can’t. And I can add that insight, the insight that everyone in the future will have. And because of the accumulation of insight, then that adds to all the more. And people will not only know the things I tell them but all the things they can build on that and they will build on it faster. And this is my attempt to be successful. I hope part of something larger than myself, there is this glorious thing larger than myself, and I am being part of it by adding to it in a way that’s real that is I’m actually adding to it in a way that they will presumably be grateful for, just like I am grateful to the people in the past who did similar things. And I’m willing for the purpose of being part of this grand thing bigger than myself, and to make this contribution to sacrifice some other things in my life. Because there is a tradeoff, as you say, we economists see the trade off. If I spent more time playing video games, I won’t be discovering as many grand insights that won’t – and I won’t build this grand future as much.

Agnes:

So you use a lot of aesthetic, not the C word, but the T word. OK, aesthetic words to describe this future. You say it’s beautiful, and it’s glorious, and you describe all these people sensing and feeling. But now in relation to the present, you’re willing to just sort of deprive yourself of the things that at least people classically call beautiful, glorious, and that they sense or feel. So like, is it just that the future aesthetic experiences are very important to you, even though you’re willing to deprive yourself of the present ones, even though you’re – the ones that are important to you, the ones that you’ll never experience?

Robin:

I experience this joy and glory of being part of this process. So we can imagine, I’m sitting at a desk and I’m working out some deep, powerful insight and I’m in the moment fully enjoying the discovery of something and then I could pause from that and have some pumpkin pie or enjoy a funny cartoon. And I will do that sometimes to be part of people and doing things but I might be pulled back to my desk and finished with just one piece of pumpkin pie and not two because I want to keep being an intellectual.

Agnes:

Supposed you’re working on a problem, OK, right? You’re working problem. You’re like – and then and then you could be absorbed in the problem trying to find the answer, right. But here’s another thing you could do, you could contemplate the glory of how your solution to this problem or your contribution to this bit of the landscape is going to be built upon by future generations, blah, blah, blah. Now that just seems like just as distracting as the pumpkin pie, you’re wasting your time from solving the problem. Right? So isn’t the very aesthetic experience of contemplating the glory of being part of the future blah all of that, also, something you should deprive yourself of?

Robin:

It doesn’t take much time. That is it’s not something I have to consciously focus on. It’s sort of the rationale and background behind the things I’m doing that I can be sort of aware in the background. Like, when you’re writing an essay that you intend to give a talk based on, the fact that you’re going to give a talk based on it affects how you write the essay. It motivates you more to write the essay knowing you will give the talk, knowing that it matters more that people will read and hear it. And you don’t have to constantly think while you’re writing the essay, thinking about the audience and imagine what color clothes they’re wearing, and how big the room is, that’s not necessary for it to motivate you in writing the essay and to feel motivated and meaningful.

Agnes:

Good. So I think that you have a cultural product, right? And the cultural product that you have, you’ve produced it yourself, is this fantasy about the future, and then building on your work and these like future half alien creatures that we’re going to be, and how they’ll know you and all of that. And that helps motivate you in your work, right? A lot of us have that. But with like literature and painting and music, that is, you know, having our engagement in works of culture, in novels, whatever. It’s not like the pumpkin pie thing. It’s not like just I get distracted for a while now I go back to like, what I’m doing it. In some cases, I can actually work it into what I’m talking about. In some cases, it just kind of like gives me energy because it gives me faith in the whole human project as like, here are some beautiful things that we actually did produce so beauty is out there, right? Maybe you can just do that with the very idea of beauty and the future civilization. So you could think of it as a little hack, right? You have this self hack of this image. And then other people are just using cultural products for that same hacking function. So it’s not so much a distraction, it’s more like a mode of self-management.

Robin:

So as we’ve discussed, the two big costs to be keeping track of are, one, sort of how much total time are you immersed? So I gave this description of the dinner party, people who are spending all their time at the dinner party, tracking all these different things.

Agnes:

No one spends all their time at dinner party.

Robin:

But they spent a lot of their time being prepared for dinner parties. They try to keep track of all the various cultural things, and they spend a lot of time on that. And the other is the sort of allegiances that that produces in you. The kinds of things you would come to celebrate more than other things because the culture celebrates them. And that is a real effect. That’s a strong effect.

Jimmy:

Can I interject here at least?

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jimmy:

I’ve been puzzled about something that Robin said that dovetails with what Agnes just said. So idea is the intellectual as detached. I think “Well, wait a minute. Why isn’t the poet who’s immersed in an experience, or the novelist who writes about their own affiliations or culture, someone who doesn’t avoid their biases, in fact, they steer into them to experience them. They’re conveying the lived experience other than artistic way. Why does that preclude them as intellectuals, or what does it? In other words, can you have a different kind of intellectual, that’s the intellectual as immersed in the biases rather than detach from them? I’m curious what both of you think of this.

Robin:

So Agnes has previously noticed that many of my colleagues are proud of not voting, because economic calculations say it doesn’t help. And yet I vote and she says why? And I say, Well, just in general, I want to do the things most people do to feel what it feels like so that I can have a better intuition for what people are doing and why and how they feel.

Agnes:

I think this is the most hilarious reason for voting than anyone has ever had. But yeah, OK.

Robin:

So I think I mean that would also be true for being biased. That is, to some degree, you want to have been biased in some contexts and feel what it’s like. Remember the feeling of what you felt in that moment and the contrast with that, as you looked on it from some distance to understand that whole process. But of course, if you fill all of your time with that, then we might suspect that you, you know, that isn’t the only goal, right? So, you know, some people study sex, right? And for those people, they probably need to have sex themselves and pay a bit of attention to that, and then maybe study other people having sex. But if they were spending all their time having sex, we might think, OK, it’s not just studying sex that you want to do here. Maybe you’re just really into sex, right? So certainly, that would be an issue with culture here. Surely – certainly, anybody who wants to understand the world should have some familiarity with culture and how it feels to enjoy culture and what culture is like. But if it ends up occupying more than half of your time and attention, then maybe you have to think there’s some other reason.

Agnes:

I feel like there’s a little bit of a notional example of this person who is spending all of their time in high culture, which, I mean, I actually know like a very, very small set of people who are like that. But even in most dinner parties, you’re not going to find – most people feel guilty for how little high culture they could consume, even intellectuals, even academics. They feel like they waste a lot of time,

Robin:

You just added the word “high”. If we just take away the word “high”…

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Most everyone is consuming a lot of culture.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Right. And people spend a lot of time watching TV, a lot of time going to movies, a lot of time reading, a lot of time shopping.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Because people are immersed in the world of culture on to a large degree all the time, most people.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

High culture share is a small fraction, but I wasn’t talking about high culture.

Agnes:

OK. I mean, I need to get back to Jimmy’s question with the new kinds of intellectual because I think that’s a really great question. But I just want to go with this for a second. I mean, you consume plenty of culture, like you’re always tweeting about different movies, you watch a lot of movies. So and then if you were to dinner party, you could talk about any of those movies, right? And you watch more movies than me so you’d be able to talk about movies more than I could at dinner party. So – and why isn't that a problem that you’ve watched so many movies like is that – how come that’s not a violation of your asceticism?

Robin:

Again, the issue here is the two things to be concerned about, two areas for again – again, it’s not just a principle of denying yourself. The whole point of asceticism is not just to deny yourself to deny yourself. It’s denying yourself to avoid problems, right. And the two main problems would be the time and resources that you’re distracted with, and sort of the way it changes you. So the idea is to be watching out for those and limiting that that would be the extent of it really.

Agnes:

OK. But I guess what I’m saying is, I just I thought you were just saying like, well, there’s a fixed amount of time, like we all spend tons of time in culture, and it’s like then, the issue is not the distraction from the intellectual but like, we’re all doing it. And the question is just how to spend your culture time, which pursuit to direct it towards and like, you know, shouldn’t you try to direct a lot of it towards like better stuff? Which seems to me like sure, better stuff is better than the stuff is not as good. But your thought is if you directed to better stuff, then you’re biased?

Robin:

Because example for me, I try to watch movies that have just been the highest rated all across history and all across the world. I’m less interested in watching the latest movies everybody else is watching right now that would talk to somebody at a dinner party. I want to be trying to do this more representative sampling.

Agnes:

OK. OK. Fair enough. OK, let me get back to Jimmy’s question about the two kinds of intellectuals. Because I think this is really interesting. I do think that one thing about you, Robin, is like, you have this category intellectual, where you think that that category is a general category that everybody has, and it’s the way everybody uses the word. But actually, you’re using it, you mean someone like you, and you’re very idiosyncratic as an intellectual, right? So, like, and so then we end up with a situation where there’s lots of other people who just like kind of call themselves intellectuals, but in your sort of technical sense, they’re maybe not right, not pure intellectuals, right? So your mode of being an intellectual is to really be detached and to step back and like you know, you’re not like in a way you’re not like allied even to a field, right? So like, you’ve switched fields. And you were complaining in our last podcast about how so many academics only pursue the interesting questions may be in their field, but they’re not – they’re not necessarily asking themselves what is the most important question, even what is the most important in my field? They’ll pursue whatever they’re trained in, in their subfield or something. Right? So you want to do this stepping back thing? And so now the question is, are there intellectuals? Are there the other – another kind of intellectuals who just lean in to the bias in effect? And I guess, that’s my sense is that just there are such people and they have an interesting and really just different perspective, from those of us who are inclined towards abstraction. And like, probably in a lot of ways in my own nature, I’m more like you than I’m like a poet, right? That is a more you know, as a philosopher, I’m inclined to abstraction to generalities, to systematizing, and to taxonomy. But then I read someone you know, like James Joyce, right, who is just clearly alive to his own sense experiences, even just his sense memory of like what he sends experienced as – it’s not a verb but what he experienced by way of his senses as a child is amazing. And that’s like a point of view on the world that contains information that is otherwise inaccessible to me. And I think it is a way of being an intellectual. Like, let’s say it’s a kind of a sensory way of intellectual.

Robin:

So, in our last podcast, I think we talked about kinds of things that you don’t achieve them by consciously directly pursuing them, like having fun. And the intellectual world, compared to most worlds is a world of explicit conscious statements, claims and plans, based on explicit conscious statements and goals. And so it would be especially ironic if it were true that the best way to be an intellectual is not to try, is to resist your conscious planning, reasoning self to just go with your feelings, like Luke did in Star Wars. And that’s the best way to actually become insightful with explicit conscious abstract claims about the world is not to try. So often, leave that as a logical possibility but surely the default of intellectuals would be that if you want to produce valuable, explicit abstract statements about the world that are true, then you should talk explicitly abstractly about which plans and topics would be most likely to achieve that, and then be directed by such analyses. We mostly do analysis of everything else explicitly abstractly, why not do explicit abstract analysis of our own things? It could be that that happens to be counterproductive. But isn’t that a prayer unlikely?

Agnes:

So I mean, like Jimmy was suggesting that there’s just another kind of intellectual besides the kind who produces explicit abstract statements about the world that are true. That’s one kind of intellectual, right? So – and I mean, I don’t care whether we use the word intellectual, it’s more like take the kind, you know, that the does that, that produces these was an abstract statements. Do they have anything to learn from the kind of person who is playing a slightly different game? But who is trying to understand the world by a kind of immersion in it?

Robin:

Do they have anything to learn is a very low bar, so, of course.

Agnes:

Right, But like, as we talked about with Aristotle, a lot of times when you want to learn from someone, you have to learn from them by really, really getting to know them, right? So there’s a cost, right?

Robin:

OK. So, intellectuals study stuff, including people. So to study people and their behaviors, one of the things they should do is try to get in their heads. And if their heads are not being intellectuals, then to some extent, intellectuals need to try to get into the head of non-intellectuals to understand non-intellectuals, so by that sense, yes, intellectuals have to not always be in intellectual mode to learn about things. But surely the general idea of intellectuals, as I understand it, is people who talk explicitly somewhat abstractly about statements about what’s true. And we debate those things, and we collect them and we build on them. That is what we are. And we are not alone in the world, we interact with others, and we profitably interact with others, and we study others. And we have to talk about those who are not that way. And we are not always that way. And yes, but still this is the core of what we are trying to do, isn’t it?

Agnes:

So, one way to think about tribalism, and loyalty and affiliation is that you’re sort of cutting off a lot of potential information and knowledge, right? You’re restricting the kinds of conclusions you’re willing to come to and the kinds of information you’re willing to allow in, because there’s something governing your thinking and your inquiry that is in a way not intellectual. There is like something that comes in before the questions that sets it all up for you. Then you could think that asceticism is making a similar move, that what you’re doing is you’re cutting off a bunch of stuff, you’re cutting off a bunch of sources of information, because you’re like worried that they’ll tempt you, right? And you’re like, “Look, I’ve committed to this way of life of being an abstract explicit statement producer. And you are – and I’m like, “But look, there are these people who’ve immersed themselves in sensory experience and who have this kind of vision of the world. And don’t you want to learn about that? And it’s like, “Well, no, if look, if I let myself go down that road, I might get really absorbed in.” So I almost wonder whether asceticism doesn’t have sort of the structure of tribalism where also the tribal person thinks, “Look, if I let myself start sympathizing with the enemy, then I might, you know, go down that road. I’m worried about that, right?” So the tribalist kind of blinders that are self put on is also put on in relation to a kind of fear about being led down the path.

Robin:

So let’s make the analogy to the religious ascetic. So we have the young pastor who wants to learn to lead his flock. And you come along as the advisor and say, “Young pastor, you haven’t sinned enough yet to really understand your flocks’ problems. You need to go out and drink and fight and have some prostitutes, and then you really understand your flocks’ problems.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

That’s what I hear you saying, you’re saying, “How can you really be a good pastor if you haven’t sinned more than you have?”

Agnes:

Well, early in this conversation, we actually established an asymmetry with the religious case, which is that you don’t want to moralize against the things that you’re cutting out. And in fact, you were willing to grant that these are things that are sources of beauty and value, etc. But that you, you know, are going to like, you have some other reasons for cutting them off besides moral one. If you want to tell me that you think all the works of culture are like evil and immoral, then I much more easily understand why you want to…

Robin:

Not, but so say the pastor says, “I don’t care about myself. Yes, I can go to hell, but I want to save my flock. I want my flock to be do well.” And so, he’s hearing this argument that in order to actually help his flock he needs to sacrifice his own future.

Agnes:

Well, in that case, then sure, yeah. You know, Harry Frankfurt has this example of a doctor who treats drug addicted patients.

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

And he’s like, “I don’t want to have the desire to take drugs. But I want to know what it’s like to have that desire, because I did better. So I don’t want to be motivated by the desire to take drugs, but I want to have the desire, right? So that I would be better able to empathize with my patients and stuff like that, right. And if somehow you could get the doctor to the experience of the desire, then he might be a better doctor. And so I guess I think that’s probably true of that pastor, if there weren’t an issue of sinning, maybe it wouldn’t be true that he’d be better off that way.

Robin:

OK. But two other considerations would be first that this pastor could actually really fear that he would lose his motivation to be religious, and fall into sin, and enjoy it too much, and immerse himself in this world of decadence. That is a real fear this pastor has. And he’s wary of that outcome. And from the point of view of other people listening to what he says and believing him, even if he thought he went into that world, did the best he could and then came out of it with the best information for his flock, other people might suspect other motives on his part, and reject his advice, because he did not – he looks suspicious. Those would be two different reasons for this pastor to be wary of the strategy.

Jimmy:

Do you see what Robin just said there? And you two have been dancing around this distinction for a while. It seems like there’s two kinds of ascetics that sort of been interweaved here. There’s the therapeutic ascetic or the restorative. This is someone who is trying to say overcome a drug addiction, or alcoholism. And that sounds different than something Agnes mentioned earlier about there being a moral quality, or you’re doing something and Robin said something higher and lower, where you’re an ascetic for higher cause you might call that… maybe, I don’t know, celebratory transcendental ascetic. So are those two kinds of ascetics? Is that just a distinction without a difference? Is it a real distinction? It seems like that you sort of talking about the both.

Robin:

Right. I mean we do often take the same thing and treat it differently when it is high versus low. That is it could be the same thing except for being high versus low. And that is a distinction that matters to us in terms how we treat things.

Agnes:

Yeah, I think it’s a really good question. Because I mean, it gets back to the Weight Watchers case, right? It’s sort of like, you know, is… and I also get back to the just the straight the tradeoff case, right? So I think that what we what we might think about the therapeutic ascetic is that that’s like the Weight Watchers example and that that’s like a case where all that’s going on is a certain kind of like a certain kind of pragmatic self-management. Maybe that is like Odysseus and the sirens where you think you might get tempted and you might end up doing the thing you don’t want to do, but it’s not because you’re going to fail to appreciate the value of the thing that you want, like health or something. It’s just that you think that that value is going to be insufficiently motivating for you. Whereas, in the higher aesthetic case, you fear losing your grip on that higher value, like the religious, it’s like you feel falling away or something from religious or the intellectual concern, where that could be the sort of thing that just falls out of your worldview entirely. And I think it’s because those higher values are ones where it’s actually an achievement even to get the value into view, and that achievement is vulnerable. So I think that’s a real difference.

Robin:

Although the achievement of lowering your weight could also be a value, you might have trouble getting sufficiently into it to motivate you to lose weight.

Agnes:

Right. So there’s a question of whether you can get it into view to motivate you. And there’s a question of whether you can see it as good. So if you think of, like, you know, I don’t know, I’m thinking of Joyce because of the sensory thing. And, you know, there’s a big part of fortunately (?) is a young man, where he’s could be telling the story of his own life, and his own falling away from religion, right. And he’s like, you know, he hears this sermon and it’s about hell, and it’s really, really gripping, like how horrible hell is and he’s completely, like, scared straight. And he’s like, “I’m going to be good.” And by the – I mean by the end of that chapter, he’s going to a prostitute. And by the next chapter, he’s like, completely lost this sense that there is a religious order at all. Like, he’s just not living in the same world that he was living in before, right? And so I think that we don’t think that’s going to happen with health, like, we don’t think it's just like, we’re going to forget that there was such a thing as the value of health or weight loss or something. We think we’re not going to able to get ourselves, push ourselves to pursue it. But I actually think, of course, it’s imaginable that somebody could really lose those as a value too.

Robin:

Here’s a low value that’s hard to keep in view, that I think is worth celebrating enormously, which is basically that our world functions because basically everyone gets up and goes to work every day, even though most of them are doing not particularly fun jobs that aren’t particularly high status and they aren’t particularly paid well. And they aren’t thanked for it much, or praised and often treated a little shabbily. And the world works because pretty much everyone gets up for work every day and goes and does that. And I don’t know that they have a clearer view of why. But they do it anyway, that there is some sense of it being the right thing to do, that makes them resist the temptation to stay in bed or stay up late the night before at party, so that they can get up and do that. And that’s kind of asceticism, but it’s not even the word because it’s the usual case, it’s the ordinary case. But it makes our world work. Without that typical habit, our world just would not function in the way it does. I want to celebrate it. I want to say, “Thank you world for getting up and working even though we don’t tell you thank you, at the end of that day, we don’t do much to celebrate you, we actually remind you of how lower status you are than other people around you in the work environment, than your customers, etc. And yet you do it.”

Jimmy:

Robin, are you worried that calling that… I mean, you can think it’s a good thing and a sacrifice. But they’re calling that ascetic is it verges on over generalizing too much like it may be empty is the word of its punch?

Robin:

Well, it’s the same kind of thing. But yes, you might want to distinguish gradations of the thing with different words to make sure that the rarer cases get a special word than the more common case.

Agnes:

Yeah, so there’s like a kind of Protestant work ethic thing that, you know, is going to overlap with asceticism, right? And, like, insofar as you see that kind of work ethic, as importantly, involving self-denial, I guess I would agree. But it would – it’s interesting to me that as you describe that case, people don’t actually have the value in view, right?

Robin:

Not very precisely or sharply but sufficiently to motivate them.

Agnes:

I mean, maybe they’re motivated without it, maybe their behavior conforms to a value that they’re actually motivated from different reasons.

Robin:

But subjectively, it feels like they are resisting a temptation for something that they subjectively value even if they can’t very precisely articulate it.

Jimmy:

Does it constitute resisting temptation if I get up and work, I don’t want to, but I’m motivated by fear? Not having a roof over my head, I see homeless people in the streets.

Robin:

Right. Well…

Jimmy:

My parents born – were very poor and I saw that. So is that – I’m wondering like do you think that tempting – in your view, do you think temptation and fear can be like co-residing?

Robin:

I think so. It is certainly like the pastor fears falling into the temptation of the sin. That’s a real fear. I mean, fear is the right word for his sense at that moment. He is afraid of what will happen to him if he does.

Agnes:

I think these are very different that is, I think that… and the reason that it’s different is that if you’re motivated by fear, it’s just not true that a lot of what is happening is your desire to preserve that motive in you or something like, that is by contrast with, there’s the higher ideal, you think you’ll lose the grip on right here, it’s like, there’s no ideal you think you might lose a grip on what you think might happen is, you know, in effect, someone has a gun to your head, right?

Robin:

Well, can’t you fear losing the higher ideal? Isn’t that coherent?

Agnes:

I mean, I think we can, we can – so we can talk about, like, the positive and negative way of describing, you know, any good thing you want to get is like a bad thing you’re avoiding in that, like, you know, like, logical sense. But I took it the Jimmy’s case was that, you know, sometimes we are less – and I think I do think that these are different that sometimes we’re less motivated by the desire to achieve a good outcome than the desire to avoid a bad outcome. And those aren’t just two different ways of describing the same thing, kind of like how resisting temptation and tradeoffs aren’t just the same thing. And it does have to do I think, with the level, with the height of the motive or something. There are some motives where we have them for free, and one of them is like not wanting to die, right? And it’s like, that is just in us, right? And so preserving it as a motive is not like a project that we have.

Robin:

So let’s talk about professional asceticism.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

So for example, my older son is an investment banker, and the early career path for an investment banker is working 80-hour weeks for a decade, or for at least five years. At the lowest levels of the profession. Similar things happen in law and a number of other management consulting, where basically, people have to not only be very sharp and smart, and cooperative, but they have to work a lot of hours. And they do that in their mind, because they have this ideal that they want to achieve this professional success. But honestly, the thing that probably most pushes them on is the fear of failure. And that’s just as real as the achievement of success. They will feel bad about themselves if they fail, that they will have not tried hard enough. And that’s what actually pushes them on the most, isn’t it?

Agnes:

So I’m going to say one last thing, and then we’re almost out of time so you guys can say your last but after that. So here’s the conclusion I’m drawing about asceticism from this discussion. So, asceticism is in a – it’s in a family of responses were of like self-management of your own motivations or something, right? And the hard driven young employees in that family and the Weight Watchers person is in the family of motivational self-management. But asceticism picks out a sub area of that where, you know, what makes it distinctive is that you have to bring in like a hierarchy of values or motives. You have to bring in especially high motives. And you were on to that, from the beginning with saying, “Well, there’s the religious case and the intellectual case, right?” So the religious case and the intellectual case are just very different from the case of your son, and investment banking, and they’re different from the Weight Watchers case. And that’s because there are these things, these high motives these like high ideals that we have, where entrenching them in ourselves is itself a project that we have, and that project of trying to entrench the ideal in yourself, that is what gives rise to this parallel process of asceticism where you’re on guard against the things that would be making that first process more difficult.

Robin:

So as before, it seems to me these are roughly the same processes, but that yes, we often want to give a different name to treat differently when it has a high status and framing versus low. And so yes, I think people want to call it a different word and see it as different even if it’s not.

Jimmy:

I think I’m going to exercise moderator asceticism. I’m still thinking about it.

Agnes:

It doesn't matter I mean you can cut this off later so…

Robin:

It’s so frustrating.

Agnes:

You could you know, you there’s probably settings you have that would make your computer not go into whatever this mode is.

Robin:

I’m going to have to find them. Oh, come on. It’s not going to take much idea or…

Jimmy:

Or maybe you’re not Robin.

Agnes:

Sorry.

Jimmy:

He’s twin Earth Robin. He’s not Robin.